Investigating ‘criticality’ in written assignments of postgraduate students Josephine Mirador Writing and Pedagogy, 2018 Perhaps one challenge facing postgraduate students is the writing of essays responding to a specific reading assignment. Such an essay requires students not only to summarize, but to engage in a discussion of the significant points of the article, pointing out its strengths as well as its weaknesses. This paper presents the results of an investigation on criticality in written assignments of postgraduate students in applied linguistics and TESOL. It will discuss: How 'critical' are students when writing their assignments? What kind of 'critical' comments are they able to offer? Seventy assignments in the form of essays were analysed, using corpora from three universities in Asia (2010-2014). The investigation adopted a combination of quantitative and qualitative content analysis. In the quantitative phase, the commenting or critiquing sentences were identified and counted vis-a-vis reporting/summarizing information. In the qualitative phase, the critiquing or commenting parts were further analysed, and identified according to their functions or 'moves'. The initial findings from the investigation include: (1) the almost equal proportion of commenting/critiquing and summarizing/reporting information in the assignments; (2) the identification of four broad functions for the commenting or critiquing information adopted by students, each of which has a number of possible specific 'moves' or categories; (3) presence of critique 'nodes' as distinguished from 'support' comments; and (4) the identification of at least four moves as the most recurrent and possibly obligatory categories. This investigation has unearthed issues that are definitely worth investigating as extensions of this research, and will be of interest (most especially) to genre analysts and teachers of writing. Most of all, it will be of interest to postgraduate students in applied linguistics/TESOL programmes who may be wondering about the level of criticality they exhibit when writing assignments for their courses.
'I'd like to know why': cultural capital and MA in education students' interpretation of feedback commentaries Josephine Mirador Assessment and Evaluation in Higher Education, 2014 This article discusses the results of an investigation into selected MA in Education students’ interpretation of feedback to their written assignments in a teaching and learning institution in the UK, using the framework of cultural capital and acculturation. A case study method was adopted to investigate four participants’ thoughts and experiences with feedback over a period of two semesters. Participants were asked to go through a think-aloud process while responding to feedback from tutors to their assignments. Results of the think-aloud were used as springboard for interviews conducted with students. The article argues that students’ diverse and variable interpretations of tutor feedback can be explained by Bourdieu’s notion of ‘connaissance’ or knowledge as cultural capital. Additionally, students were found to have subscribed to the ‘acculturation’ process modelled by tutors in feedback provision.
Moves, intentions and the language of feedback commentaries in education Josephine Mirador Indonesian Journal of Applied Linguistics, 2014 This article discusses the results of an investigation into feedback commentaries provided by tutors to assignments of Masters in Education students in a pre-2002teaching and learning institution in the UK. The methodology adopted involved a qualitative discourse analysis of fifty feedback commentaries and made use of an inter-rating procedure involving three raters to identify tutor messages. The investigation revealed three groups of ‘moves’ (tutor messages) in feedback. Additionally, the article argues that tutor messages can find theoretical anchor in Heron’s categories of counselling interventions, and that such categories can explain tutor intentions in feedback provision. The research concludes that the use of facilitative ‘moves’ by tutors is a way for them to provide strong support to postgraduate students. Keywords: Written feedback, move analysis, tutor commentaries, feedback in higher education
How well am I doing? Using a Corpus-based analysis to investigate tutor and institutional messages in Comment Sheets MICK RANDALL, JOSEPHINE MIRADOR Assessment and Evaluation in Higher Education, 2003 Current Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education guidelines highlight the necessity for institutional assessment to be clear and transparent. Whilst institutions spend much energy on making sure that criteria on which they assess work are published and clear, much of the feedback to students on different courses is discursive in nature and consists of both formative and summative assessment. Students also receive information about grades and criteria from a variety of institutional documents. This paper uses a concordance of feedback sheets to investigate the way that tutors use institutional discourse in written feedback sheets on a part-time MA(Ed) and the functions performed by the written feedback. The paper finds a high degree of congruence between the institutional and tutor corpora. Both corpora place considerable emphasis on academic conventions, yet this is not reflected in the criteria used for assessment.
A move analysis of written feedback in higher education Josephine F Mirador Relc Journal, 2000 One way to examine whether or not there is a match between tutor intentions and student perceptions is to focus on the feedback given to students. This paper presents a move analysis of a corpus of written feedback provided to postgraduate students enrolled in a part-time Education program. This paper focuses on the discussion of the information types found in written feedback, the patterns of organising such information and the linguistic preferences that signal tutor intentions. The paper is relevant to researchers in discourse analysis and tutors providing assessment feedback.
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EDUCATION RESEARCHER CRGA Pasa, CK Cheung, SL Law, JF Mirador
MOST CITED SCHOLAR PUBLICATIONS
A move analysis of written feedback in higher education JF Mirador RELC journal 31 (1), 45-60 , 2000 2000.0 Citations: 75
How well am I doing? Using a corpus-based analysis to investigate tutor and institutional messages in comment sheets M Randall, J MIRADOR Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education 28 (5), 515-526 , 2003 2003.0 Citations: 39
Moves, intentions and the language of feedback commentaries in education J Mirador Indonesian Journal of Applied Linguistics 4 (1), 39-53 , 2014 2014.0 Citations: 9
Investigating'Criticality'in written assignments of postgraduate students. J Mirador Writing & Pedagogy 10 , 2018 2018.0 Citations: 6
‘I’d like to know why’: cultural capital and MA in education students’ interpretation of feedback commentaries J Mirador Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education 39 (6), 715-728 , 2014 2014.0 Citations: 5
Negotiating “Third spaces”: EAP apprenticeship, academic writing, and Chinese Students JF Mirador Language Education in Asia 2 (2), 169-184 , 2011 2011.0 Citations: 5
You need to criticize, not just summarize! J Mirador Writing & Pedagogy 10 (1-2), 61-92 , 2018 2018.0 Citations: 2
Repeated Exposure to Vocabulary Websites and Academic Vocabulary Retention by University Students in Japan J Mirador, TH Ellsworth Journal of English and Applied Linguistics 1 (1), 6 , 2022 2022.0 Citations: 1
The construction and interpretation of assignment feedback in higher education JF Mirador 2006.0 Citations: 1
What's the Story? How Higher Education Students Interpret Assessment Feedback JF Mirador The Asia-Pacific Education Researcher 11 (2), 1-1 , 2002 2002.0 Citations: 1
How positive are tutors when responding to written assignments of MA in education students? JF Mirador 2010.0
Academic writing workbook for the international learner of english JF Mirador 2010.0
EDUCATION RESEARCHER CRGA Pasa, CK Cheung, SL Law, JF Mirador
